


Mercury, Cupid, Folly, and Time

by peonies



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Between Episodes, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-21 00:08:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11345967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peonies/pseuds/peonies
Summary: He shouldn’t be able to ruin so many lives with one decision. – Sketch of 3.15, leading into 3.16.





	Mercury, Cupid, Folly, and Time

**Author's Note:**

> Written to fill in the gap between "The Wrath of Savitar" and "Into the Speed Force," and to throw in some possible fun consequences of timeline shenanigans that weren't explored in the show. (By "fun" I mean "concerning.")

There’s a brief moment just before the claw pierces his suit when the adrenaline pumping through his veins makes him believe he can do just about anything. Outrun the past, unmask the nightmare. Reach back into the Speed Force and pry his brother out, whole, unharmed. _Save Wally. Save Iris._ Who the hell is Savitar, anyway – just a man in a suit, like so many other men in suits, all murderers – he rebounds to his feet after falling three stories into a dumpster, and the tempest inside him roars, crackling with electric fury. Savitar makes to seize him by the neck, but he forces his armored hand away, leaping behind him.

“Show your face,” he demands, clasping his arm around Savitar’s neck, pinning his wrist, trying to pry the mask off with his other hand. His gloved fingers can’t find purchase on the metal. Smooth as glass, cold as ice. Like trying to clench his fist around water. He feels the white lightning humming just below the surface. So much power that he feels weak as a child next to it. Panic surges up into his throat.

Savitar breaks his headlock. Shrugs him off of his shoulders like a jacket. Turns before Barry can let go of his hand, unsheathes the claw. Impales him.

He doesn’t know whether to be thankful that it goes into his shoulder and not his heart. He can feel the right wing of his collarbone snap. Pain follows the wound like thunder following lightning. His hand is still on Savitar’s and he can’t move it. The world is silent. Terrifyingly still. His breath flutters in his lungs. He stares down at the blade, dumbfounded.

“I want so badly to kill you right now,” the monster muses, dragging him closer. He has no choice but to stagger toward him. “And I will. But you have to live a little while longer. Long enough to see Iris die.”

 _She won’t,_ he wants to say, but Savitar has him pinned like an insect. _So easy._ Just like future-Iris, hanging in the air, trying to comfort him even in the face of death. He can’t even protect himself. She’s going to die just like this. A brief moment of agony, then a brilliant, beautiful world _gone,_ and God, he can’t take that. His shoulder fills with starbursts of pain when he uses his free hand to cut through the metal, shouting in wordless rage.

Savitar roars, and he thinks he might actually kill him this time – he probably has a backup hand-knife, since he is The Future and everything – but instead he vanishes in a burst of white lightning, and Barry collapses against a wooden pallet, groaning. He can’t move his right arm. Someone is saying something to him on the comms but he can’t hear through the rush of blood in his ears. The night air is damp and cold in his lungs as he gasps for breath. There are other injuries, he knows, bruises and sprains and cracks, but he can’t feel them. Can only feel the screaming, pulsing pain engulfing his shoulder. Severed muscle fibers. Snapped tendons. Broken bones. All pushing up against the blade every time he does anything as simple as breathe. Cold fire radiating out into his chest.

He thinks he might pass out. Or maybe he has, for one or two seconds. The pain wipes his mind of almost everything but wordless panic.

 _Run, Barry,_ he hears in the back of his head. _Run._

STAR Labs. _I know. But how?_ He can’t move. _Take the spike out?_ No. He’s not a doctor. He doesn’t know what damage that will cause. Only knows how to name the injury on a corpse. _Have to run._

 _Just one more time,_ he lies to himself, and takes a deep, shuddering breath. _Your legs are fine._ He stands up, even though his body begs him not to. The last few years have trained him to ignore its demands.

His legs carry him a few blocks before he has to stop because his vision grays out. He falls down on one knee. The shearing of the wound, the lopsided balance of his immobile right shoulder. Too much. Like he’s ripping his arm off. Tissue tearing, joints separating. _Try again._

Can’t.

 _Try again,_ he insists. _Can’t be this goddamn weak._

 _Iris,_ he thinks. _Wally._

Bite the bullet.

“Can you make it back by yourself?” He can hear Caitlin’s voice now. Practically vibrating with anxiety. They’ve been tracking his vitals. They know. They saw. Everything.

“Yes,” he breathes, and doesn’t wait for her to respond.

In the blink of anyone else’s eye, he’s staggering into the Cortex, but for a speedster, it’s a special little eternity. Barry is acutely aware of the spike twisting under the torque and inertia of taking ninety-degree turns at hundreds of miles per hour. He can’t keep going, but he does. Pushes past the sensation of his arm being torn away from his body. Feels only the Speed Force coursing through him, pushing him forward. Thinks only about Wally, trapped in hell’s fast lane, screaming for his help.

“Oh my god.” They’re all there, but Caitlin locks eyes with him first. Her expression morphs from shock to horror as she confirms the readings sent back from the suit to the monitor on the table. Not just a red pulse point anymore. Blood saturating his shirt beneath the suit. He’s freezing.

She snaps into action. He doesn’t understand most of the medical jargon that she tosses around, not because he can’t, but because his brain is overloaded with different sensations – the glaring fluorescent lights, the terrified shrill of the EKG, the shard of metal buried in his shoulder, so many voices, hands pushing and tugging in different directions.

“Shoulder,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “On the bed.” Joe guides him forward, turns him around.

“No, the bone’s – broken—”

Then his back hits the gurney and he can’t control the way his body seizes up. It hurts so damn much.

_“Barry?” Her eyes are full of tears. She’s fighting the panic. Trying to comfort him in the face of death, even when he’s failed her in every way imaginable, in every possible universe._

He resurfaces. Holds it down, barely, pressing the heel of his hand into his temple, then over his mouth. Doesn’t scream. Doesn’t hyperventilate. Tries to take deep breaths. Listens to Caitlin detail the state of his body to him. She’s pulling on blue latex gloves. Says she’ll have to do it by hand, but it’ll be okay. The feedback from the suit and the angle of entry indicate that the blade didn’t hit any major arteries. Of course not. Oliver’s voice, impatient – _There is a difference, Barry, between having powers and having precision._

 _You have to live a little while longer,_ Savitar growls.

“The blade didn’t hit your organs, but it did shatter your clavicle,” she confirms. The anxiety in her voice is gone. Just the grim determination of a surgeon, now. Dr. Snow is in. Cisco, on the other hand, is barely able to keep complete panic out of his voice. Tells him to hold on. “We have to take it out.”

It’s the most musical sentence he’s heard, ever. “Do it.” Resists the urge to add, _Now._

“Any medicine I give you, your metabolism will burn through.” Final warning. _Are you ready?_ her expression asks.

“All right. Just do it, okay? Just do it.” He’s pleading. The adrenaline is only starting to resurge and he can’t take another crash. He can hear her tell everyone to hold him down. Julian attempting to say something reassuring. Joe pressing the gauze to his mouth so he doesn’t bite through his tongue. Hands on his legs. Securing his chest, his burning right arm. They should all be worried about Wally.

“I’m so sorry.” It’s Caitlin again for a moment, scared for him, scared of hurting him. Her guilt, under all of it. He nods, tries to tell her with his face that it’s okay, that it doesn’t _matter,_ he needs to get back out there, but he doesn’t think he can muster a convincing expression with the gauze in his mouth and cold sweat pouring down his forehead.

Her countdown is as much for her as it is for him.

It takes her a moment to dislodge the blade, but in speedster time, it might as well have been a year. Bones grinding against each other, unbearable pressure. Every nerve lighting up in agony. Like she’s dragging a supernova through his chest. He can’t stop screaming.

Mercifully, the world dissolves. And maybe he does, too.

* * *

There’s not much left to say. From anyone. He knows why. Caitlin asks him if he’s in pain. He doesn’t respond. She knows the pain is just a formality. The muscle is already knitting itself back together. In a week, there won’t even be a scar. For once, he wishes the healing would slow down so he could feel this, feel the pain like a normal person, have some kind of reminder of the way he’s hurt everyone else. He doesn’t deserve to forget.

Joe is clutching the charred remains of his son’s suit. He doesn’t remember bringing it back – someone must have gone to the site and retrieved it. Everyone… is here. Looking at him expectantly. He’s too tired to do anything but apologize.

_Sorry doesn’t change anything._

He doesn’t know what to do. Wally’s in the Speed Force and Iris is going to die. He’s been so selfish. His eyes sting.

One by one, they filter out of the room. Jesse, H.R. Then Joe, when he can’t stand to look at Barry anymore. Iris follows him. Touches his hand before she leaves in consolation, but all he can see or feel is the absence of the ring. His mistake. He’s pushed her so far away.

Cisco and Julian excuse themselves half-heartedly. It’s just him and Caitlin now. Her guilt and his.

She tells him that she’s sorry. She knows it was irresponsible of her to keep the Stone. She thinks Wally’s – disappearance, not death – was her fault. But it’s not. If she hadn’t kept that fragment, Savitar would have emerged in the particle accelerator instead. Maybe the Speed Force would have taken him. Maybe it would have taken Jay. Sure, she’s at fault. A lot of them are. But she wouldn’t have had to face that tree of decisions if it hadn’t been for Flashpoint.

If it hadn’t been for his greed.

“I was afraid,” she says, voice breaking, as if he blames her.

“I know.” His voice is not much more than a hoarse whisper. “Believe me, I know. Fear makes us do a lot of things that we shouldn’t.” And, quieter, because they both know it’s the truth: “My fear’s the reason for all of this.”

“You mean Flashpoint?”

He nods, and the tears come in earnest, now. “Things were good before I went back that night. Savitar knows that. But it wasn’t perfect. And I couldn’t leave it the hell alone.” He presses his left sleeve to his eyes. “They’re still dead. My mom, my dad. Ronnie. And now Dante. You’re a meta. Digg and Lyla’s daughter is gone. Wally’s gone. Iris…”

Caitlin doesn’t say anything. Maybe she does blame him for turning her into Killer Frost, now that she knows there was a world before Flashpoint where she was just a scientist. Just like Cisco knows Dante was alive in the old timeline. Where they were on the way to becoming brothers again.

He shouldn’t be able to ruin so many lives with one decision.

“I’m sorry, Caitlin.”

Barry closes his eyes. The EKG makes it perfectly clear that he’s not asleep, but he doesn’t have anything else to say. After a minute, he hears Caitlin sniff, then walk away. She must be crying. The door closes behind her.

His mind wanders, replaying memories seemingly at random. Iris’s fifteenth birthday party. Falling off of his bike in seventh grade. Holding his breath underwater at the pool, looking up at the shape of the waves from below. Falling asleep on his O-chem textbook. Drawing diagrams on the study lounge whiteboard, the squeak of the marker. Cisco spinning around and around in a chair, arms folded, deep in thought.

Which Cisco? Which Oliver? Which Iris? He doesn’t know who the people in his memories are. It’s like he’s been jumping from one world to the next, trying to pretend that these strangers are his best friends. Their lives sprang into existence the moment he let Thawne go in Flashpoint. Whoever he was, whatever his past is in this world – he hasn’t lived it. He doesn’t remember Dante’s funeral. He doesn’t remember Lyla having a son. He turned the world upside down and inside out and there’s no going back, not anymore.

No going back to Iris, waiting on the porch for him to come home in another universe.

Joe, teaching him how to change a tire in the garage. His high school chemistry lab partner messing up his titration so he had to do it all over again. Sitting outside a detective’s office at the CCPD, waiting to give a testimony of his mother’s murder when a secretary puts a cup of water in his hands.

Memory. Or just wishful thinking. He drifts. Feels like the oldest man alive.

* * *

Caitlin’s there when he wakes up again. She checks the gauze taped to his chest, then changes it. Barry examines the wound idly while she’s preparing the new bandage, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and sitting up. It’s not the gaping hole he thought it would be – Dr. Snow stitched it shut while he was out, apparently. Her sutures are neat and clean. There’s no sign of infection or swelling. He flexes his arm experimentally, finding that he can’t quite raise it above shoulder level yet without protest.

“Don’t,” Caitlin warns him, taping the bandage over the wound. “You’re going to open everything up again. You might have superhuman regeneration, but that bone won’t be ready to move for a few more hours.”

“Yeah, feels that way.” He winces, taking the gray STAR Labs shirt from her hands. The bruising on his ribs seems to be completely healed, at least.

“Do you need help putting it on?”

He shakes his head. “I’m good. But thanks.”

“See you outside, then.” She gives him a quick, perfunctory smile, and then she’s gone again.

By the clock, it’s been about eight hours since he fought Savitar. Early morning, then. The sun might be coming up. He’s spent about seven of those hours asleep. Long enough.

He takes off the jacket and pulls the shirt over his right arm first, trying not to jostle the wound. Doesn’t quite work, but it’s not the first time he’s had to deal with an arm injury, and all of the previous times he didn’t have super-healing to get him back on his feet. He deftly tugs the hem down over his back, then repeats the whole process with the jacket. There are socks and shoes from where he changed into the Flash suit earlier, and he pulls them back on.

It’s not like he’s been magically re-energized from his post-surgical nap. He’s tired as hell. But he thinks he knows what he has to do, and he needs to do it as quickly as possible.

Wally is faster than he is. He’s green, sure, and overconfident, but Barry had been like that, too, until Oliver put him in his place. And Barry, for all of his experience, won’t be able to get to Iris in time.

Savitar wants him to see Iris die. Well – what if he’s not there? One last way to change the future. Switch out one Flash for another. Let Wally take his rightful place. It solves so many things, now that he’s given up on having a perfect life. Or any life at all. Even now, when he knows he can’t, he’s thinking of ways to restore the timeline. To give back everything he took away.

The Speed Force is like a dream. An endless, empty dream filled with specters and shadows, formed from thunder and lightning. A world shifting and sliding so quickly that it almost nullifies the effects of his speed. There’s no one there, not really. Just a primordial kinetic consciousness that seems to enjoy _A Christmas Carol_ too much. Wally West is somewhere in there, an innocent kid getting Ebenezer Scrooged because the people who were supposed to look out for him didn’t. And after all the mistakes Barry’s made, after all of these abuses of power, he’s not sure he trusts himself to be anywhere on Earth right now. On any Earth.

 _You have everything,_ he echoes in his head. _And deserve none of it._

When Barry closes his eyes, he still sees Iris sitting on the stairs, saying she’ll wait for him. Maybe it’s selfish, but he thinks that memory could carry him through anything.

This is his one chance to make things right. So he walks into the Cortex, takes a long, hard look at the suit, and tells Cisco to prepare the breach room.

There’s one last mistake that needs to be fixed. Then he'll be done.


End file.
